To replace the actual eating of the paschal lamb that took place on the very first Passover night in Goshen, our Sages over the years devised the Seder. It is the paradigmatic teaching moment. Deliberately so. They wanted to convey a sense of renewed relevance and contemporaneity each year for every generation in the retelling of the Exodus from Egypt.
And so we read that it was not our forebears alone whom God redeemed from horrific, dignity-destroying bondage in Egypt. “Even us (sitting at our table, today, some three and half thousand years later) He redeemed, along with our forebears.”
That very explicit statement in the Haggadah, along with other similar explicit and implicit statements in the text, is the proof of our Sages’ intent.
But what of our Sages’ success?
They will only have succeeded in connecting us – each year, indeed every day of each year – in a timeless, invisible cord of shared peoplehood with and responsibility for everybody else sitting around a Seder table throughout the world, if we ourselves feel good about belonging to the Jewish people.
And to feel that way we have to want to belong to the Jewish people and to know what it means to actually do so. That means education – at home and at school. We have to be able to send our children to Jewish schools to instruct, supplement and reinforce what and how they live at home.
If we are to see ourselves as also having left the slavery of Egypt, we must also see ourselves connected to that timeless invisible cord that has tied us to our people for thousands of years. That feeling and that cord must last forever.
Through the education of our children and of their children and of their children forever after, they will.
GAJE wishes the entire community a meaningful, healthy, happy Passover.
Netivot has managed not to raise its tuition for next year.
We urge families to enroll their children in CHAT.
•••
Shabbat shalom. Chag samayach.
GAJE
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 